John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  Gradually, through successive drafts, the book took shape. A draft dated January 1972 is told in the third person, and begins with Billy, now renamed Jim, arriving at Thursgood’s. The Tank has become the familiar Circus, and Smiley has assumed the role of investigator, while Tarr is no longer the ageing Chief but the younger semi-hooligan Ricki Tarr, whose encounter with Irina in Hong Kong starts the mole-hunt. Tarr follows Smiley back from his club and accosts him on his doorstep – until a draft dated October 1972, which introduces the character of Peter Guillam, first seen in Call for the Dead. In this and subsequent drafts Tarr tells his story first to Guillam, who alerts Lacon.

  Guillam becomes an important secondary character in the sequence of novels. A man of David’s generation, he admires his senior colleagues who have fought in the war. Being younger, Guillam is a more plausible man of action than Smiley, capable of subduing Tarr when he turns violent. Several of the chapters are told from Guillam’s point of view, which enables the reader to observe Smiley in action without revealing his thoughts. In the book’s denouement the reader shares in Guillam’s confusion, when the man whom he has always idolised is unmasked as a traitor.

  In its final form, the novel centres on Smiley: indeed some of the late drafts are headed ‘The Reluctant Autumn of George Smiley, being the first volume of The Quest for Karla’; only in the final version is the title Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy used. Smiley’s continuing love for his adulterous wife is his weakness, exploited by Karla to divert his attention from the mole. Guillam’s failure to understand his enigmatic girlfriend Camilla mirrors Smiley’s perplexity at Lady Ann’s unfaithfulness.

  One of the strengths of the book is a vivid sense of the Circus itself. Some of the most compelling scenes are set there. In David’s previous novels the Circus had been comparatively nebulous, but here it springs sharply into focus. The anonymous entrance, the garrulous janitors, the dingy interior, the warren of corridors and the clanking lifts – all create the illusion of a real place: as well they might, because the interior of the Circus is based on Broadway Buildings, the headquarters of the Secret Service in David’s time (though in 1964 MI6 had moved to a characterless modern office block in Lambeth). David carefully reconnoitred his locations, and recorded them in photographs taken from different angles. He modelled the Circus’s exterior on an unassuming building (since demolished), which, he told an American journalist, ‘had some of the same qualities of dilapidation and anonymity’.15 His concern for detail extended to identifying individual rooms within.

  As in David’s previous books, but to a much greater extent, the sense of authenticity is made keener by the use of intelligence jargon, some of it genuine but much of it invented – ‘the Cousins’ (Americans), ‘the competition’ (MI5), ‘scalphunters’ (specialists in dangerous operations), ‘babysitters’ (bodyguards), ‘pavement artists’ (specialists in active surveillance), ‘lamplighters’ (specialists in watching and listening), ‘reptile fund’ (a secret account to finance intelligence operations), and so on. Some of David’s coinages have subsequently been adopted by intelligence professionals – for example, ‘honey trap’, to mean enticing an enemy into a sexually compromising situation for the purposes of blackmail. On the other hand the term ‘Moscow Rules’ was an established term used by Western intelligence agencies to mean a set of principles to guide those operating in the enemy capital; but in this novel and in its successor Smiley’s People David would extend its meaning, to include inconspicuous signals such as chalk marks and drawing pins, as part of the procedure for arranging a clandestine rendezvous.

  The word ‘mole’, in the sense defined by Irina, has gone into general usage, extending beyond the limits of espionage, to mean a person who betrays confidential information from a position of trust, especially over a long period. So apposite is the term that one feels it must have been in use for many years. In 1981 the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary wrote to say that its appearance in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was the earliest printed use of the word that he and his colleagues could find; he asked David to confirm that he had invented it. David had a vague memory that the equivalent Russian word krot had been used in this sense by the KGB during the period when he was an intelligence officer. But perhaps this was a false memory, as the OED editors were unable to trace it, either in Russian dictionaries or from other sources.16 In his memoirs the Soviet agent Michael Straight, one of the ‘Cambridge ring’ of spies recruited in the 1930s, suggests that it was in use within their circle.17 It is used in John Buchan’s The House of the Four Winds (1935). Indeed one of David’s former SIS colleagues wrote to inform him that Francis Bacon refers to ‘moles perpetually working and casting to undermine’ the monarch in his Historie of the Reigne of King Henry the Seventh, written in 1622 and published posthumously in 1641.18 But the latest edition of the OED recognises that ‘earlier uses appear to be isolated’ and ‘lack the specificity of meaning’ which the term acquired after it had been popularised in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

  As some reviewers would be quick to notice, the mole’s story was similar in a number of ways to that of the real-life double agent Kim Philby. David incorporated details of real incidents into the narrative which played on this similarity – such as the Volkov affair, when a would-be Soviet defector was returned to Moscow bandaged and under sedation, and then executed, just as Irina had been. Volkov had been betrayed by Philby.19 In his evocation of the paranoia within the Circus as the fear grows that they have a traitor in their midst, David may have drawn on the experiences of his friend and former controller George Leggett, with whom he had remained in intermittent contact. Leggett himself had been suspected of treachery after a Polish defector had indicated the presence of a Soviet spy within MI5.* Ironically the suggestion had emerged during an interview conducted by Leggett himself. On his return from sabbatical leave in 1968, he had been subjected to a humiliating interrogation by Peter Wright.* Instead of taking up his designated post as head of one of the counter-espionage sections, he had been unexpectedly sidelined to another branch of the Service. In 1971 he had retired early, at the age of only fifty, deeply upset at his treatment after thirty years’ loyal service with MI5. David employed him as a fact-checker for several of his books.

  David had kept in touch with his former station chief in Bonn, Dickie Franks, who would become assistant chief in 1977, and who would succeed Maurice Oldfield as chief (‘C’) the following year. It was Franks who mediated David’s continuing connection with his former employers over the years. David was amused to observe how closely his own statements were monitored. Journalists who came to interview him would report what he had said to them to contacts in the intelligence services; often his remarks would come back to him with surprising speed. Around this time, for example, he had a chat with the journalist Anthony Sampson, who was giving a barbecue to celebrate publication of his latest book, on the oil companies.† David suggested that Sampson might like to write next about the intelligence community. Forty-eight hours later Franks was on the phone complaining to him.

  Though David finished what he referred to as ‘the complete working draft’ of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in the early summer of June 1973, he would not deliver the final text until the winter, another indication of the care he took in rewriting and revising. ‘My book went on for ever and ever and has only just gone to the publishers,’ he told Vivian Green on 9 December. ‘I wrote the book three times in all, and it was still rushed at the end.’20

  In fact David would revise the text yet further in response to the comments he received, from Bob Gottlieb in particular. In March 1974 he sent another bulletin to Green. ‘I have done a lot since that draft to clarify and dramatize the book, and the professional consensus seems to be that it is much improved.’21

  David learned to trust Gottlieb’s judgement. He would tell an interviewer working on a piece about Gottlieb that the editorial process at Knopf was ‘streets ahead’ of its British counterpart. In his experience Briti
sh publishers tended to print what they received, misspellings and all; the American equivalent was much more rigorous. ‘I’m always putting commas in, and he’s always taking them out, but we know that about each other,’ Gottlieb would tell the same interviewer. ‘He’ll say, Look, if you absolutely need this one, have it. And I’ll say, Well, I would have liked it, but I guess I can live without it.’

  Though erudite and intelligent, Gottlieb was not the heroic kind of editor who tried to write the book for the author. ‘Bob knows how much to tell me and how much to leave to me,’ said David. ‘Bob is like a good movie director with an actor – he’s just trying to get the best out of you.’

  Bob will tell me how he understands a story, and where he feels slightly disappointed, perhaps … He will say to me, I’m going to draw a wavy line down these pages; for me, they’re too lyrical, too self-conscious, too over-the-top. And I will say, OK, for the moment I disagree because I’m in love with every word I’ve written, but I’ll rake it over and lick my wounds, and we’ll see what happens. Or he’ll say something like, Actually you didn’t need this beautiful passage of description here … Occasionally I’ll say I disagree, in which case we will leave the matter in suspense until I recognize that he is right. In no case have I ever regretted taking Bob’s advice …

  Gottlieb found David ‘unbelievably sensitive’ to editorial suggestions: ‘he’ll take the slightest hint and come back with thirty extraordinary new pages’. In response to just such a suggestion, David expanded and developed the chapter in which Smiley visits Connie Sachs in Oxford, which became one of the most vivid and telling scenes in the book.

  Gottlieb did not believe in mollycoddling his authors. ‘I don’t think writers need all that sympathy,’ he would say. ‘They need to be told when their books are bad.’ He was very much a hands-on editor, who preferred to roll up his sleeves and get down to work, rather than making a fuss of an author. ‘Most publishers, when you arrive in New York with your (as you hope) best-selling manuscript, send flowers to your suite, arrange for a limo, maybe, at the airport, and then let you go and put on the nosebag at some great restaurant,’ said David. ‘With Bob you did best to arrive in jeans and sneakers, and then you lay on your tummy side-by-side with him on the floor of his office and sandwiches were brought up.’ Gottlieb preferred not to pay huge advances, not even when other publishing houses were offering twice as much. ‘Negotiations were always tight with Bob,’ David would say. ‘He felt that for half the money, you got the best.’

  After they had worked on several books together, David exacted a small revenge:

  My agent called me and said, Okay, we’ve got x-zillion yen and whatnot, and I said, And lunch. My agent said, What? I said, And lunch. When I get to New York I want to be taken, by Bob, to a decent restaurant for once and not eat one of those lousy tuna sandwiches lying on my tummy in his room. Bob called me that evening and said, I think we have a deal; and is that true about lunch? And I said, Yup, Bob, that’s the break point in the deal. Very well, he said. Not a lot of laughter. So I arrived in New York, and there was Bob, a rare sight in a suit, and we went to a restaurant he had found out about.* He ate extremely frugally, and drank nothing, and watched me with venomous eyes as I made my way through the menu.22

  Jane took David to lunch at the Savoy to celebrate the completion of the novel. They were enjoying a glass of champagne before the meal when Ronnie unexpectedly appeared, as always immaculately dressed in a dark pinstripe suit, bold red braces, handmade shoes and shirt, silk tie and chunky cufflinks. ‘What the hell are you doing in the restaurant, son?’ he asked. ‘You should be in the Grill, it’s far better. Come and join us.’

  Ronnie was now operating from plush offices in Jermyn Street, using such names as Trans World Trading. A large telex machine stood in the foyer. Glenda Voakes, who joined him as his secretary at the age of only seventeen, quickly learned to address him as ‘RC’; she was delighted to be earning more than twice as much as in her previous job, though surprised to receive payment in cash. She fended off his advances (he was her senior by half a century) with no ill feeling on either side. Once he gave her instructions that he should not be disturbed while he entertained his guest, described as an Austrian countess, and firmly closed his door; over the next half-hour or so she overheard scuffling sounds coming from inside, until the pair of them emerged, both flushed, and left for lunch at Wheeler’s; afterwards she found a pair of tights discarded in his wastepaper bin. Occasionally she was invited to join her boss for lunch at Jules Bar, where he sat at his regular table, ‘the Royal Box’, surrounded by cronies such as the snooker champion Joe Davis, the wicketkeeper Godfrey Evans, and an RAF chum, Group Captain Harry Summers. Sometimes he would give her chips from the casino at the Sportsman, just north of Marble Arch, where he would go two or three times a month to play roulette. Other visitors to the offices included the racehorse trainer Paddy Prendergast and the Brylcreemed cricketer Denis Compton, as well as a variety of business associates, some seedy and others sinister. Recently Ronnie had been trying to involve his son in a deal to sell 5,000 tons of scrap metal to an overseas buyer.

  In the Savoy, David explained that they were celebrating a special occasion. Nevertheless, he and Jane were persuaded to join Ronnie and his guests for a drink. They were introduced to a middle-aged couple from Poole, who owned ‘a fine bit of land overlooking the sea, son’; Ronnie was advising them how best to develop it. A bottle of champagne was cooling in an ice bucket. David noticed that it was Dom Pérignon, reflecting wryly that he and Jane had settled for the house bubbly, sold by the glass.

  Like Tinker, Tailor, the second novel in the ‘Quest for Karla’ sequence pitches Smiley against his Soviet opponent, though this time much of the action takes place in South-east Asia, a region then in turmoil. The Vietnam War, which had begun in 1945 as a Communist-led revolt against French colonial rule, and had continued as a struggle against American ‘imperialism’, was in its last stages. Back in 1954, as the French prepared to pull out, President Eisenhower had warned that if one country succumbed to Communist insurgents, its neighbours could fall like dominoes. Now his prediction seemed set to come true. The Americans had withdrawn, abandoning the beleaguered pro-Western government in South Vietnam to fight the North Vietnamese Communists alone. The Vietnam War had spilled over into the adjoining Kingdom of Laos, where the government had been fighting the Communist Pathet Lao on and off for more than twenty years. A fragile truce now threatened to break apart. Cambodia too was tottering: by 1974 the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge controlled much of the Cambodian countryside and had begun laying siege to the cities. French Indochina was a rotten fruit, ready to drop into Communist hands.

  David wanted to see what was happening at close hand. In any case he felt that he needed to alter his way of working, though it meant extended periods away from Jane and his young son Nick. ‘I had become too sedentary, too much the desk officer, not enough the field man,’ he wrote of this decision more than twenty-five years later.

  Imagination and deliberately falsified memory were no longer enough. I deserved, and needed, to share the misfortunes I was writing about … Henceforth, I promised myself that if I wanted to write about a place I would go there … In a word, I started writing on the hoof, in the company of whichever secret sharer I had appointed as my main character, and to this day that’s what I like to do.23

  When David travels for his research he invariably does so ‘in character’, playing the part of his secret sharer, and seeing the places he is visiting through the sharer’s eyes rather than through his own.

  Early in 1974 David arrived in Hong Kong. He had come east of Suez, he said, to get his ‘knees brown’, a self-mocking reference to the days when white men wore shorts in the tropics.24 He had already been to Singapore, where he had originally planned to set much of the novel, but found it uninspiring as a location. There especially, he had dreaded coming across anyone who might associate him with Ronnie, remembering in particular th
e ill-fated football-pools scheme which had led to his father’s arrest and deportation. All over the Far East, it seemed, there were people whom Ronnie had defrauded in some way. It therefore came as something of a surprise when, at the Happy Valley racecourse in Hong Kong, David ran into somebody who spoke warmly of him. This was a colonial policeman, his father’s ex-jailer; from their brief conversation it became obvious that even in prison Ronnie had been fattening his victim for the pot. ‘Mr Cornwell, sir, your father is one of the finest men I ever met,’ the innocent policeman told him. ‘I’m retiring soon, and when I get back to London, he’s going to set me up in business.’

  According to Richard Hughes, the most senior of the foreign correspondents based in Hong Kong, David saw ‘everyone here who mattered’ within a short time.25 In his novel he would provide a ‘shamelessly exaggerated’ portrait of Hughes as Old Craw, doyen of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club. ‘Some people, once met, simply elbow their way into a novel and sit there till the writer finds them a place,’ David would write later. In fact Hughes had form, since he had been the model for the character of ‘Dikko’ Henderson, chief of Australian intelligence in postwar Japan, in Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice (1964).

  From a very early stage David had an idea that the protagonist of his next novel would be a journalist. He found such a character in Peter Simms, an Englishman who in an earlier generation might have been running the Empire instead of recording its demise. Simms was married to a Burmese princess, whom he had met when they were both students at Cambridge. He was a very tall man, and broad, ‘with a laugh like a rolling artillery barrage that you could hear across any crowded bar in Southeast Asia’. His bluff manner concealed a more complex interior; like so many British foreign correspondents, he worked on the side for British intelligence. To David, Simms was instantly recognisable as ‘Office’, as a ‘UA’* (Unofficial Assistant). ‘It was as if the British Empire had been boiled down to the last drop, and there in the bottom of the cup you would find Peter,’ a fellow journalist would write. ‘Sometimes I thought of him as Fowler in Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American”, the cynical old British journalist whose face had seen a thousand betrayals and compromises. At other times he reminded me of Conrad’s Lord Jim, idealistic and vulnerable, perhaps trying to redeem, if not himself, then the white race for its sins east of Suez.’26